By Rita McInerney

Miss Christine Bullock's life has been closely linked to Our Lady of Lourdes since 1913 when she was the first person to be baptized and confirmed there.

Now 88, she remembers the day. She was the only one receiving the sacraments from Bishop Benjamin Kelly. Her godmother was "a white lady from St. Anthony's."

Later the young girl was to become housekeeper at Our Lady of Lourdes convent. For 52 devoted years she served the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament whose mission was to educate black and Indian children. She knew and loved Venerable Mother Katherine Drexel, foundress of the order, who visited regularly from the motherhouse outside Philadelphia.

"I'm praying every day she will be canonized," she tells a visitor, taking a prayer card with Mother Drexel's picture from a worn prayerbook and offering it to her visitor. Mother Drexel's cause for beatification was formally begun in 1964 and she was declared venerable, the first step to sainthood this year.

"Miss Christine," now bent over with age, attends Mass each Saturday evening. A friend picks her up and drives her the short distance from her first floor apartment to the church. "The only thing I do is go to church," she told her visitor. "Old age isn't what it's cracked up to be."

She is steadfast in her church attendance but determined to stay "the way I was brought up" with no qualms about voicing her dislike of the many changes. For example, "The altar's the priest's place, not the women's." She will not take Eucharist from a member of her sex. "You don't see a prayerbook, no hats, and they need a dress code."

"I had a black chiffon waist (blouse) that I wore to church one Sunday. When I went to receive Communion the priest told me he didn't want to see me wear that waist to church any more. Now they go to Communion in those short shorts or sloppy looking jeans."

"You don't hear about the Sacred Heart or the Blessed Sacrament. They don't sing Catholic hymns anymore. We had the Blessed Virgin Mary Sodality and the Children of Mary. I don't know why they changed it so," she said.

"I've been working all my life," she said, "for a lot of people. In those days they hired young girls to nurse the babies and do the cooking." She grew up in the house which stood where the church was later built and when she went to work for the sisters, she just crossed the schoolyard to get to the convent.

Back in those days she said she and the rectory housekeeper also had to keep the church clean and sweep the schoolyard. This was where the young Martin Luther King, Jr., a child of the neighborhood, used to play marbles every afternoon. "The sisters let the neighborhood children play in the yard," she recalled.

The sisters were good to work for. "They ate anything. I shopped for the food. During the Depression I used to take a child's wagon to the curb (municipal) market and load it up."

"Mother (Drexel) used to come into the kitchen and sit down at the table and talk with me … Mother wasn't such a beautiful woman but she sure was a great woman," she said of her old friend.

Her life at 88 is limited to the small apartment she shares with Mrs. Lillian Hogan and her weekly trips to Mass. She can no longer go, as she used to, on Friday afternoon to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home to iron for the sisters who care for the dying.

But she has lots of memories of her church-centered life, and a plaque on the wall of the church near the front door which honors her: "In recognition of 60 years of devoted service to Our Lady of Lourdes -- 1913 - 1973 -- this plaque honors Christine Bullock." It bears the name of the Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan and the date, Dec. 11, 1983.

That was the day she lunched with the late archbishop and a party of friends at an elegant downtown hotel. A big day in her memory log.

Her memory is good but "sometimes I can't say my prayers straight," she said. "But the Lord knows what's in my heart."